Ifeka speaks!

IFEKA OKONKWO
(ifekaokonkwo@yahoo.com) is the most vociferous reader of this column. Highly opinionated, unrepentantly blunt and almost gleefully unsychophantic, he takes his democratic and human rights very seriously indeed and flatly refuses to be as bovinely philosophical as most of us are about the multiple disappointments that the average Nigerian faces.

I don’t always agree with Ifeka – his gra-gra is sometimes too much for me! But he often talks the kind of sense that this society needs to hear repeatedly.

He is a conveyor of uncomfortable Home Truths. He aggressively rejects the weary, defeated “siddon look” mentality that prevents us from fighting back and enables our leaders to despise us and take ordinary citizens for granted.

If all Nigerians were like Ifeka, we would have a better country and be much less exploited; and I totally admire his gutsy willingness to not only tell it like it is but to NOT allow soft sentimentalities or tribalism or tradition or politeness or fear to silence his shrill and completely justifiable anger about bum raps.

Ifeka is, quite simply, a force of nature; and I think that you should hear his views about some of the topics that have been recently covered on this page.

EFCC and recovered N14b
PS: During the Channels News at 10pm on December 10 2012, the Chairman of EFCC, said that they have recovered N14b from Nigerians who were transferring the money overseas at our airports, in a space of few months this year. He even said that they caught someone with $7m.

He should stop insulting our sensibilities by pretending that EFCC is working when he did not disclose the names of those Nigerians they caught with our money, because they must be our top politicians who are sacred cows that will never go to jail to serve as a deterrent to would-be looters who are waiting on the wings to have a bite of our national cake.

What punishment has been meted out to those people who were involved in the fuel subsidy scam? Are they not moving about, free as the air enjoying their loot? That is why I hate our politicians and wish them all dead, because they are the architects of our woes in our richly blessed country!

Our stressful and painful existence!
DONU, you wrote that we should wish Goodluck Jonathan a less stressful 2013, following his wife’s recent illness and the death of his brother. While thanking God that his wife is now hale and hearty and sympathising with him over the death of his younger brother, I want to inform him that many Nigerians have fallen sick, while others have died for being subjected to the most extreme stress of general insecurity of lives and property, epileptic power supply, expensive and inadequate health facilities, lack of pipe-borne water, bad roads, joblessness, high cost of petroleum products that have resulted in the galloping cost of goods and services.

All the above challenges confronting us, are due to the fact that we have been saddled with the most greedy, corrupt, inept and visionless ruling class that we have ever had in our nation’s history and who are only interested in accumulating wealth and not in making our lives comfortable with the abundant resources at their disposal!

Has any of our present ruling class been under the unpleasant stress of being in total blackout of electricity on alternate days, as has been our lot in the area of Awka where I reside since 2007 with no end in sight to our plight? Now that the official price of diesel which I use for my plant, is N165 per litre, it then means that the price of petrol will increase and in the process skyrocket the prices of goods and services, thereby adding to our woes, while our oppressors and our new colonisers who have so much money, will not feel the pains of the increase in prices of goods and foodstuffs.

Since the middle of March 2012, when I started writing down what I have been spending on diesel for my plant and servicing it, as at 8th of December, the total cost has risen to N178,620. So, imagine what I have spent in running and maintaining my generating set since 2007 when PHCN started load shedding in our area.

I will never wish our present crop of ruling class well and I will continue to have the utmost contempt for them, until they start giving us the so-called dividends of democracy which they have been enjoying themselves with the exclusion of the rest of us, period!Ifeka Okonkwo